No Child Left Behind

Esther Pennell


The Federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation has impacted every public classroom around the Country by redirecting the focus of our teachers towards the state tests. Schools have begun to spend more time on math and reading as compared to other subjects. Some schools have even lengthened the time of the math and reading periods. Teachers are spending so much time teaching to the state tests that they have narrowed the content of the curriculum being taught to our children. Students are not being provided with adequate time to develop their critical thinking skills. Nor are they provided with adequate time to pursue other special interests such as art and music. More time is however, being spent on individual students who fail to meet the benchmarks set for state standardized tests. Schools have begun to analyze individual student test results to determine which students need more help. These students are being pulled out of other classes to be tutored in the area of reading and math. This practice has reduced the achievement gap with regard to the standardized tests.

The NCLB legislation was signed into law in January 2002 with bipartisan support. The purpose of the legislation is to ensure that all children have a fair, equal, and significant opportunity to obtain a high-quality education and reach, at a minimum, proficiency on challenging state academic achievement standards and assessments. The NCLB legislation requires every state to put in place a set of standards together with a detailed testing plan designed to make sure the standards are being met. These standards defined by the individual states must at least include math, reading, language arts and science. The legislation requires schools to raise reading and math test scores and it gives the states twelve years to reach their target. The success of the legislation, as it is currently written, will be highly dependent upon the way it is administered by states and specific strategies they devise to promote improvement. Since the fifty states are allowed to set different academic standards, states are able to dummy down their standards and testing which may result in artificially high test scores.

While NCLB holds schools accountable for their students’ test scores, individual students are not. NCLB does not require standards for high school graduation or levels of performance for passing one grade to the next. While states can require these standards on their own, they are under no Federal mandate to do so. Arne Duncan, U.S. Education Secretary, “thinks we are lying to our students because when they meet state standards, there is a false assumption that they’re prepared for leaving high school. But when the students have trouble passing the ACT and SAT tests, it becomes evident that they were not adequately prepared at the high school level. Our students must be prepared for global competition when they graduate high school. National college-ready standards would ensure that no student is surprised when they leave high school and take college entrance exams.” National standards that conform to internationally bench marked standards must be incorporated into the NCLB legislation to prepare our students for the global competition which they will face upon entering the job market.


Sources:
Peterson, Paul E. No Child Left Behind? The Politics and Practice of School Accountability
Duncan, Arne – Interview with Brian Lehrer – summer 2009
http://www.ed.gov/policy